Now for the Accountability Court in Islamabad to issue arrest warrants for Mian Nawaz Sharif’s sons might make sense, even if it meant having the court itself invaded by lawyers at a subsequent hearing. True, that invasion got Mian Nawaz to escape indictment, but for how long? All that is lacking is the boys carrying gandasas, and wearing fright wigs.

Maybe the boys’ brother-in-law, Captain Safdar, should invest in a long kurta. He can tell his constituents meaningfully he was arrested for an offence against the person. Look, he’s now on bail. I think it was the shock of being arrested that made him speak out against Qadianis in the Army, which should be seen as directed against the COAS. Someone should remind him who appointed the present COAS. But he would probably shoot back and ask who appointed Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf COAS.

However, a court in Lahore also issued warrants for Shehbaz Taseer. Wasn’t he the victim of a kidnapping, who had been kept for years, before being released? But so what? He was involved, wasn’t he? And just because he was a governor’s son doesn’t mean he was exempt from helping the investigating officer get his.

Now imagine what’ll happen if they try that on the American-Canadian couple kidnapped while backpacking in Afghanistan, and released only after five years in captivity. Even though the husband probably had to invent excuses to explain why the couple went backpacking in 2012, they not only had the child they were expecting when they were caught, but also had two more. The Haqqani Network, who captured them, were probably glad to let them go before they further increased the number of mouths to feed. President Donald Trump seemed pleased about the release, as he saw it as a sign that Pakistan no longer ‘disrespected’ the USA. That ‘disrespect’ seems to be his main motive. Well, he’ll have to behave if he doesn’t want disrespect, whether the sort shown by Pakistan, or the sort shown by rapper Eminem, who used the f-word about Trump recently. Eminem may be excused, what with the Nobel Literature Prize going to a novelist this year, not a rapper, but Trump is still waiting for the Peace Prize, which his predecessor Obama got his very first year as President. But then, he might say, as an anonymous rapper is supposed to have said, “There’s next year.”

Trump has said (in a tape made public during the campaign) what he does to women who refuse his advances, and thus presumably disrespect him. There’s been a mini-explosion in Hollywood, where movie mogul and producer Harvey Weinstein has been revealed as a predator and a harasser. He has taken the excuse that there have been changes since the 1960s and 1970s, when he was growing up. He has not taken the plea that he was doing what his President did. For his pains, his wife has left him, his own company has fired him as Chairman and now the Motion Pictures Academy is voting on expelling him. And Trump is not even close to being impeached.

Both Trump and Weinstein are probably saddened by the fact that Playboy founder Hugh Hefner is dead. They’re both his kind of guy. Less famously, and also less sleazily, Fatima Sughra, who as a young girl stormed Civil Secretariat and hoisted the Pakistan flag there, has passed away, as has Nusrat Ara Begum, who was Bil Batori, the sister of Hamoon Jadugar in Ainak Wala Jin, the PTV play that had a record run, but went off the air 20 years ago.

More recently, the Australian cricket team had a brick heaved at the window of the team bus in Guwahati, after they had beaten India in a T20I. Not only did that brick show them that losing is what the Modi government expects from visiting cricket teams, it also apparently prompted the Sri Lankan team to refuse to come to Pakistan in November. The Sri Lankan board may send a second-string team. Though they won both the Tests, they’ve lost the first ODI. It seems they don’t think they have the luck o’ th’ Irish, who have agreed to play their first-ever Test against Pakistan. In Ireland, though. Not Pakistan. That means that though Ireland and Afghanistan got Test status together, Afghanistan will have to wait to play its first Test. If not Pakistan, maybe it will get it against India. Maybe that is why the ICC is looking towards four-day Tests. Gone, it seems, are the good old days where five days were barely enough for the first innings. The Timeless Test had been tried before World War II to stop draws, but the experiment ended with the longest ever Test, 13 days of excruciating boredom, between England and South Africa, which had to be ended in a draw so the tourists could catch their return ship.

Well, in Pakistan, there will be so much security that visiting teams need not fear bricks through bus windows. And can eat beef in peace.